Historian tackled labour's struggles

THE Depression was a formative experience for many Australians
who never forgot the hardship and humiliation it inflicted. World
War II was their time of sacrifice but also of hope for a better
world.

Postwar reconstruction implemented plans to banish unemployment,
poverty and insecurity, and to enable ex-servicemen and women to
pursue study and fulfil their talents. The Cold War dashed the
earlier hope, and exposed those on the left to intense
suspicion.

Bob Gollan's book Revolutionaries and Reformists (1975)
gave the best account of this era of intense ideological
conflict.

It does not evade the errors and excesses of left-wing
activists, for it seeks to learn from the past.

It was his past. His youthful experience of the 1930s led him to
the Communist Party of Australia. He was a beneficiary of the
postwar expansion of universities. And he was the senior member of
the generation of radical historians - including Russel Ward, Ian
Turner, Miriam Dixson and Eric Fry - who broadened Australian
history to incorporate the experience and aspirations of the labour
movement.

Robin Allenby Gollan, who has died aged 89, was born on December
8, the day news reached Australia that Jerusalem had fallen to the
Australian Light Horse, commanded by General Allenby. His father
William's family came from Scotland and had settled Woodburn, on
the Richmond River. His mother, originally Jeannie Maclean, was
also of Scottish descent. Both were members of the Salvation Army
and Jeannie worked for it on the West Australian goldfields.

The family moved to a dairy farm at Dorrigo, and later to a
mixed farm on Cambewarra Mountain, near Nowra, though they had
spells shopkeeping unsuccessfully in Sydney. Bob was the last of
five surviving children; his sister Myra became a Salvation Army
officer and his brothers Bill and Ken schoolteachers. Their success
- despite notoriety as a leading communist, Bill became a high
school principal - helped Bob pursue his own career.

His education began at a single-teacher bush school, which he
reached on a horse. He attended secondary school in Wollongong,
then Fort Street, and in 1939 completed an honours degree at Sydney
University, sharing the history medal with his academic and
political antithesis, John Manning Ward. He taught in NSW schools
until enlistment in the RAAF in 1942.

After wartime service, Gollan lectured at Sydney Teachers
College and completed a masters thesis that formed the basis of his
book Radical and Working Class Politics (1960), which traces
the emergence of the Australian labour movement. He won a
scholarship to the London School of Economics, where Harold Laski
supervised his doctoral thesis.

Gollan had joined the Communist Party at university and was
prominent in the Teachers Federation, whose president, Sam Lewis,
wanted him to accept a union post. However, Gollan took a research
post at the new Australian National University even though it was
untenured and paid less, a risky step since he had married the
historian and communist Daphne Morris, and they had two children,
Klim and Kathy.

The early ANU made scant provision for wives and ASIO vetted
academic appointments. To its credit, the university resisted
pressure to block Bob's appointment and eventually found a place
for Daphne to teach. Gollan flourished in the Research School of
Social Sciences, especially after Keith Hancock returned from
London to direct it. The two men differed in their politics but
both enjoyed bushwalking and fishing; Hancock valued the younger
man as a historian of "great integrity" and arranged for him to
write a history of the Commonwealth Bank.

Gollan also produced The Coalminers of New South Wales
(1963), the first research-based study of an Australian union,
establishing a model for the genre. That led him to collect union
records and with the economic historian Noel Butlin, who gathered
company records, he helped establish the ANU archives as the chief
national repository. With Eric Fry he established the Australian
Society for the Study of Labour History in 1961. The society's
journal, Labour History, became the principal forum for a
new kind of history, from below, that enlivened the discipline.

He left the Communist Party after Khrushchev's admission of
Stalin's atrocities and the Australian party's refusal to allow
discussion of them. He had joined "because it seemed to me the only
party fully committed to a struggle for socialism and against
fascism". He left in 1957, "because that no longer seemed to be the
case". Yet he maintained those principles and his activism revived
with the campaign against the Vietnam War and in the peace
movement.

Bob and Daphne's marriage ended in the 1960s and he found the
research school uncongenial after Hancock's retirement. He was
rescued from personal unhappiness by Anne Ayrton, whom he married,
and was appointed history professor.

Retiring from the chair in 1981, he moved with Anne to Armands
Nook, near Bermagui, where, with help from friends, they built a
house. They returned to Canberra at the end of the decade,
travelled widely by campervan, and remained active in community
life.

Intensely Australian in speech and manner, Bob Gollan was an
internationalist. His first overseas trip was in 1941 to a
conference in Mexico, rallying support for the war. His incisive
mind cut through cant. He was not impressed by academic preening,
but his contributions at seminars and conferences were invariably
telling. He was a gifted raconteur, who delighted in telling
stories that deflated pomposity, and a lively drinking companion.
His voice was seldom raised, though instances of bullying or humbug
roused him. His decency and sincerity made him a bridge for
scholars and activists seeking guidance and support; and through
his own scholarship he created the bridge that allows us to
understand his generation of activists.